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INCITS Announces Five New American National Standards
Two Storage, Three Real-Time Locating Systems Standards Now Available

Washington, DC – August 11, 2003 – The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) announced the approval of five new standards for the third quarter of 2003, with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accepting all five as new American National Standards. The standards are INCITS 372:  Fibre Channel Backbone standard (FC-BB-2); INCITS 338: High-Performance Parallel Interface – 6400 Mbit/s Optical Specification (HIPPI-6400-OPT); and INCITS 371.1, 371.2, and 371.3: Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS) - Part 1: 2.4 GHz Air Interface Protocol, Part 2: 433-MHz Air Interface Protocol, and Part 3: Application Programming Interface.

This year, INCITS has received approval from ANSI on a total of ten new standards—five by Technical Committee T10 (SCSI Storage Interfaces), two by Technical Committee T11 (Fibre Channel Interfaces), and three by Technical Committee T20 (Real-Time Locating Systems).  In addition, T11 has produced two Technical Reports.

“Vendors and customers worked together to develop these standards,” noted Patrick Morris, Executive Director of INCITS.  “The thriving Technical Committees that developed these new storage and real-time locating systems standards have a combined, voting membership of 187 organizations—both leading buyers and suppliers of the technologies.  In keeping with our commitment to develop open standards, we welcome all interested parties to the process.”

Overview of the New Standards

INCITS 372 defines the functions and mappings necessary to bridge (tunnel) between physically separate instances of the same network definition. It consists of three distinct Fibre Channel mappings resulting in the following three specifications: Fibre Channel over ATM backbone network (FC-BB-2_ATM), Fibre Channel over SONET backbone network (FC-BB-2_SONET), and Fibre Channel over TCP/IP backbone network (FC-BB-2_IP). The three specifications are completely independent and allow individual Fibre Channel links to be created between fabrics in an interoperable manner. Although SONET, ATM, and TCP/IP links cannot be directly interconnected, all three types of links may be present in the same Fibre Channel fabric.

INCITS 338 specifies a media-level, point-to-point, 12-channel, full-duplex, electrical/optical interface, with each channel operating at 500 Mbit/s or 1Gbit/s.  In developing HIPPI-6400-OPT, Technical Committee T11 ensured that it was generic enough for multiple uses; it is a unique standard in addressing parallel optical paths used for a single data transfer.

The INCITS 371 series is three new standards that define two Air Interface Protocols and a single Application Programming Interface (API) for Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS) for use in asset management.  Part 1 establishes a technical standard for radio frequency beacon systems that operate at an internationally available 2.4-GHz Band frequency and that are intended to provide approximate location (3m) on a regular basis (several times a minute).  Part 2 establishes a technical standard for radio frequency beacon systems that operate at an internationally available 433-Hz Band frequency and that are intended to provide presence and location data for assets that have RTLS tags affixed.  Part 3 defines the Application Programming Interface (API).  To be fully compliant with this standard, RTLS must comply with either Part 1 or Part 2. 

About INCITS
INCITS (www.incits.org) is the primary U.S. focus of standardization in the field of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) encompassing storage, processing, transfer, display, management, organization, and retrieval of information. As such, INCITS also serves as the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) Technical Advisory Group for ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. JTC 1 is responsible for International standardization in the field of information technology. INCITS is accredited by ANSI and operates under its rules, designed to ensure that voluntary standards are developed by the consensus of directly and materially affected interests.

INCITS Executive Board of supplier and customer members includes Apple Computer, EIA, Farance Inc., Food Marketing Institute (FMI), Hewlett-Packard, IBM, ICCP, IEEE, Intel, Microsoft, Network Appliance, NIST, Office of the Secretary Defense /Science & Technology, Oracle, Panasonic Technologies, Purdue University, Sony Electronics, Sun Microsystems, the Uniform Code Council, and Unisys.